“In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it’s doing to us. It’s what we’re doing to it.” -Steven Johnson

I created my Twitter account in the summer of 2009. When it became ‘the thing’ with all of my friends, I was at first against conforming. I always resented my friends for finding out about the cool trends months before me, so I was originally standoffish to it. It didn’t take me very long to realize the usefulness of Twitter. I started to get curious. I started to tweet. I realized many inside jokes, that if my friends had not tweeted at the moment they originated, would have been long forgotten. Funny things that people said became captured into the surreal space that is the Twittersphere.

• “If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel” 
• “If tomatoes are a fruit, isn’t ketchup a smoothie?”
• “I wonder what inanimate objects are doing when I’m not looking at them”

It was a quick and broadcasted way to capture the moment in a short <140 character memo. I haven’t looked back through these tweets in a long time, as Twitter hasn’t given us an easy option to do so yet. If there was a easier access to tweets from years ago, I’m sure I would find myself laughing hysterically as I read over and recall some old memories that I had long since forgotten. As time progressed, my usage for Twitter began to evolve and it became a form of mass texting. My core group of friends and I seemed to be the only ones on twitter, that I cared to ask that is. Quickly, Twitter had become a way of mass communication in our group.

• “Where is the party at?” (This was the most popular back in the high school days)
• “Dan’s house tonight for some Halo”
• “Night swimming at my place, get here!” (I ended up having a lot of last minute chill sessions by my pool at 1 a.m in the morning during these summer nights. Good times.)

Instead of meticulously picking out those select people that I wanted to send out the same text to (my phone was limited to 10 recipients a message, by the way) and since I knew that they were constantly checking Twitter, I started to use it as a way of mass texting.

Long story short, It worked! Twitter became useful for the exact purpose of which I was intending it to. From starting it writing down inside jokes or funny comments that people had said, to creating a new platform for mass texting, Twitter’s use was solely up to me. This brings me back to the quote at the top of this blog. It wasn’t about what Twitter was doing for me, it was what I was doing with Twitter. The article “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live” by Steven Johnson spoke directly to me about the constantly changing form of usage of Twitter. Now-a-days, the article states that many celebrities are using it to promote their foundations, or the constant use of hashtags (#) to denote topics or tags (much like 001 and Engl303 in this article). The article went on to discuss how the use of sharing links through Twitter was universal. It went on to state how many people would read an interesting article, then share it via Twitter. This would cause all of the people following that particular person to have that link put into their access all in view on their timelines. This made Twitter useful for sharing hundreds of thousands of articles and websites with the click of a button. The sharing capacity and the outreach potential is exponential.

Here is an example. One person tweets “Check out this link about cats www.cats.com” onto their timeline. This person has 450 followers. Let’s say 10% of those followers who think the link is hilarious, who have 450 followers themselves, retweets that link. That is  ~20,000 people that now have access to that link which would have otherwise never existed in their train of thought had it not been for that one original person.

Twitter became a form a mass communication. Twitter became a form of Mass Media. If a picture is worth 1000 words, can a tweet be worth more than the  140 characters provided?

-Michael Farrell